Who Wears Hats to the Dentist?
THERE IS ONE LAST TRIP I need to take: back to the coast to see my mother’s sister Doreen. She is house-sitting for one of her son’s neighbors in the village. This time we may be able to talk.
I am listless in the days before flying and after Pooly has left. The summer has gathered itself up for one final blast and the air is glutinous and distorting, the sound of the ice-cream van, with its sinister tinkle, muffled as it drives around the neighborhood. In the shade of the trees on Third Avenue two ladies in elegant robes and headdresses run a public telephone service—an ironing board with two old-fashioned telephones balanced on it, hooked up illegally via the junction box. When I pass them on my afternoon walks, they look like a mirage. One evening, there is a storm. I sit on the deck sipping tea and watching. It is just as my mother said: forked lightning like judgment; warm, quick snatches of wind; rain so hard it bounces off the ground and meets itself falling.
A few days before leaving, I take the car to the garage, and it stalls and dies at the end of the street, right in front of Siya. Lolling, graceful, he pushes himself upright from where he’s sitting on the wall, and with a whistle summons men from the park to help out. He himself is far too grand to take part, but he organizes the effort with much barking and waving of arms. A large, sullen man has to be cajoled into taking the driver’s seat, and he shoots me nervous glances throughout, as if I might call the police and accuse him of carjacking. When the engine starts, I give each of them ten rand, partly from gratitude, partly, I am aware, as some sort of insurance. Siya bows very low and gives me a glittering look, as if he has done me the favor, this fine morning, of allowing me to feel good about myself.
A few days later, I am walking down the street when peripherally I see a blurry movement: a figure crossing the park, jumping the fence, and traveling toward me at speed. My heart sinks; I am going to get mugged again. Ahead of me in the road stands Siya, and when he turns, I think, “A coordinated attack.” He grins broadly when he sees me, and then his focus shifts over my shoulder. The grin fades. Frowning, he lifts his hand and wags his finger, a small but unmistakable gesture: “No.” As I draw level with him, he grabs me by the arm and pushes me roughly up the street. “Go on,” he says. He sounds cross. “Be more careful.” I look back, and Siya is standing in the road, all boyishness gone, staring down a man who, half turned and muttering, is dragging himself up the street and back to the park.
• • •
WITHOUT HER SON as an audience, my aunt seems calmer, more thoughtful. After driving the three hours from George Airport, I pull up at the house, and she greets me with warmth. The house is more remote than Jason’s, farther up the hill and on the edge of a semiwooded area, where a dirt track runs toward a logging facility. The lock on the front door doesn’t strike me as adequate.
“Aren’t you afraid up here, alone?” I ask.
My aunt shrugs. She has the blank indifference of someone inured to risk. “Not really. I’m lonely. I’m ashamed to admit it, but it’s true.”
Doreen sits smoking on the terrace most days, looking out at the view. She is dog-sitting, too, for a poodle she has no respect for and refers to scornfully as a sheep on stilts. The owners have asked her to detick it every time she comes back from a walk, but “Fuck that,” says my aunt. “I’m not killing ticks for those people when they’re not even paying me.” That afternoon, we take the dog for a walk and on the way back stop in for tea at one of the prettiest cottages in the community, occupied by an elderly couple who wouldn’t look out of place in a village in Kent.
My aunt shows me off; a visitor from England, just the thing to get one over on these pretentious retirees with their fussy house and superior attitude and la-di-da anglicized accents. My aunt’s belligerence in the face of perceived condescension is as familiar to me as my own face; it could be my mother sitting there. When David, the husband, shows us a photo of a large puff adder that materialized on their doorstep a month earlier and which he chased off, Doreen affects boredom. When he contradicts her assertion that if you take half a banknote into the bank, they are obliged to give you a new one, she becomes furious.
“Why are you disagreeing?” she says.
David looks surprised. “Because I don’t agree.”
When we get back to the house, I laugh at her. “You got so aggressive with him!” I say, and Doreen looks mystified. “Did I? I didn’t even notice.” Anyway, she says, she isn’t sure about those two, with all their knickknacks and so pleased with themselves about the puff adder. “They’re not my bag o’ laundry.”
That evening, she cooks me stew, and as I put the glasses out on the table, she jokes, “Want to do a Ouija board?” She gives me a devilish look. “We could call up Jimmy.”
At last, over dinner, my aunt and I talk. Like Fay’s recollections, Doreen’s come out as sudden flashes surrounded by darkness. She guards her memories jealously in the face of her siblings’ rival memories. When I tell her Fay has complete memory loss between the knife at her throat and the children’s home afterward, Doreen snorts, “Really? Well, I don’t believe that for an instant.”
When I mention Steven’s decision not to marry in case he repeated the violent patterns of his father and brothers, she gives me an even more derisive look. “No one would have him, more like.” As Doreen talks, I think how everyone in the family congratulates themselves on being simultaneously the least damaged and the most afflicted of the siblings. The ones at the top had it worst, they say, because they had it longest. The ones at the bottom say they had it worst because, as well as everything else, they were bullied by the ones at the top. Doreen tells me about a fight she once had with Tony. She had brought her first boyfriend home, a well-spoken boy who, Tony sneered after he left, “speaks like a queer.”
“And you speak like a fucking Kaffir,” snapped his sister, and he hit her so hard across the face “I actually saw stars, like in a cartoon.” Being no slouch in this department, Doreen ran to the kitchen, picked up a bread knife, and, lunging at her brother, said, “I’m going to kill you,” before their mother ran in and managed to pull them apart.
I had never considered this; neither the pecking order of injury, nor the possibility that the siblings were anything but a united front against a common oppressor. A lively debate still rages, says Doreen, over who in a family that large can claim rights to middle-child issues. She smiles. “John thinks it’s him, but I’m the real middle child.”
She looks at me curiously for a moment. “Why do you want to know all this?” she says. She knows I’m a journalist, and I haven’t disguised the fact that I am taking notes for a book, nor that I have been to the archives to look at the transcript. But I don’t think she means that. Doreen is shrewd enough to see through the camouflage.
“Because I won’t be ashamed. Fuck that,” I say, playing once more to the idea we both have of my mother.
Doreen smiles. “Just like Paula.”
The first time my mother came back for a visit, Doreen was in her early twenties and with a failed marriage already behind her. My mother seemed a very glamorous figure, thirteen years her senior and with the worldly air of the returnee. She wanted to give Doreen the benefit of her experience in Swinging London and talked frankly to her younger sister about how to improve her sex life. I am as amazed by this as by anything I’ve heard. My mother, for all her posturing on how sophisticated she was, could not mention sex to me without chasing it up, a second later, with the suggestion that it would in all likelihood lead to death. When she ordered me clothes from mail-order catalogues, she invariably ordered them way too big. “Room to grow into,” she said. It was only years later, when I found photos from a holiday we took in my teens, that I saw with sudden clarity what I couldn’t see then: a size-8 girl in a size-18 dress. If she felt the same kind of protective impulse toward her younger sisters, it was obviously outweighed by something else: a need to show off.
“Yes,” says Doreen. “She was quite helpful. Eye-opening. You know, you could try this, or this.” She looks at me wickedly while I make involuntary retching sounds.
We continue talking as we clear the table. “Fay was my baby, Steve was my baby” had always struck me as an odd choice of language for my mother to use. Were it not for her telling me about a small operation she had in her twenties, without which she could not have conceived, I would seriously have worried about the family tree.
“I think she told me about the operation for a reason,” I say, as we sit down for tea. “In case I found out about all this and ever started wondering.”
My aunt looks blank.
“You know,” I say, “is everyone related to each other in the proper way?” This seems to me such an obvious thought that I’m surprised by my aunt’s shock. Doreen’s jaw actually drops.
“My God,” she says. “You poor thing.”
• • •
THIS IS WHAT SHE REMEMBERS: a gritty powder in the milk; a door opening in the night; a trip out into the country on a bicycle.
Jimmy brought them the milk before they went to sleep. Doreen noticed there was powder in it and told Fay to spit it out. She was only a child, but she had lived long enough in that household to assume it was some kind of sedative and fought to stay awake. A few hours later, her father crept into the room, and when she felt his hand go up her pajama leg, she kicked him so hard he slunk away.
She has almost no memory of the court proceedings. Doreen was a weak link in the prosecution because she hadn’t been abused. There is an incident she remembers that she didn’t tell the court. She tells me now. She was five years old. There was a green bicycle the children shared. Her father took her out into the country for a bike ride, and when they were sufficiently far from the house, dragged her off the bike and tried to rape her. “I screamed so loudly,” says Doreen. “Pure instinct. And I’m still screaming now.”
She remembers the children’s home, the formal portrait of her father the staff made her put by her bed. The matron’s husband was an Uncle Gussy, practically onomatopoeic for “child molester,” and sure enough, there was a scandal at the home. Fay had told me about this; that Uncle Gussy, who with his wife, Matron Flotto, left shortly afterwards, had been caught with his hand up one of the children’s skirts. Fay told me she’d gone to her mother and said, “You did nothing last time. Now do something.” Marjorie removed them from the home the next day and they went back to live with her. Family life resumed.
“I didn’t blame Paula for leaving,” says Doreen. “When my mother took the old man back, that was the end for her.”
• • •
MY AUNT WAS ELEVEN YEARS old when she was called upon to testify in support of the evidence of her twelve-year-old sister, in whose name the action had been brought. Her sister and her mother had already testified. Waiting to go on was her sixteen-year-old brother, Tony, and her twenty-four-year-old half-sister, Pauline. This was the preliminary hearing, to determine whether the case would proceed to the High Court for a full trial.
The magistrates’ court was in a small provincial mining town, fifteen miles west of Johannesburg and a few miles from the family home, although, the court recorded, the twelve-year-old was staying at the house of friends and her mother was staying in Johannesburg, at her stepdaughter’s bedsit. It took place over two weeks in November, before a magistrate called Jooste. If my mother’s contention was true—that the case foundered at the High Court because her stepmother changed her testimony—there is no record of it in the archive. The only records that remain, therefore, are those from the first trial, when by all accounts everyone was telling the truth. Any frustration I have at the missing paperwork is soothed by this fact.
And so here is Marjorie, who in this first court appearance holds her nerve, despite the extraordinary provocation of being cross-examined in open court by her own husband. She was thirty-seven years old. She had been married for twenty years. When I came to look at these papers again, I saw what I had not seen the first time. That this wretched woman, as my mother came to see her, had married him when she was only seventeen.
She confirmed her address to the court—that she was staying with her stepdaughter, Pauline, at Soper Road—and the defendant stepped forward to begin his questioning. Only some of the transcript has survived, although enough to indicate his line of defense.
Q: I have been drinking for about 20 years. Heavily for about 15 years.
A: Correct.
Q: You have known that I get blackouts whilst under the influence of liquor.
A: Correct.
Q: I had to ask you what had happened when I was drunk.
A: Correct.
Q: A few years ago we discovered that I was an alcoholic and I made desperate attempts to have it cured.
A: That is correct.
She confirmed that at the time of their marriage her husband had a daughter from a previous marriage. She told the court she noticed nothing wrong at their first address, in Springfield, but at the second, at Zwartkoppies, in the district of Vereeniging, she became “a little suspicious.” One night, she heard her ten-year-old say the words “Leave me alone.” She went into the child’s bedroom to discover the accused awake, the child half-asleep, and both covered by blankets. “I told the accused that the child should not sleep with him, she is too big.”
When the family moved to Witpoortjie, a mining community in the district of Roodepoort, the defendant worked shifts in the mines and would sometimes be home in the middle of the afternoon.
One day about three months ago in September I came home early, about 6 p.m. I usually get home at 7 p.m. I went to my bedroom and found the door locked. I called for the accused to open the door. Faith opened the door. When she opened the door, she was tidying her clothes. She was straightening her dress. When I asked them to open the door it was done immediately. The accused was also in the room, in bed, covered with blankets. Faith looked upset. I said “what is going on?” and she did not reply. The accused was under the influence of liquor. Faith left the room.
Q: When sober I was quite devoted to you and children.
A: That is so.
Q: We were happy.
A: Apart from the drinking, yes.
Q: You had no complaints in any way.
A: Not whilst you were sober.
Q: When intoxicated there was a change of behavior in myself.
A: Yes.
Q: I became a different person.
A: Yes, correct.
Six months later, the witness noticed a light on in the bathroom and got up to switch it off. She looked in the children’s bedroom and saw her husband lying in the bed that two of his daughters shared. She told him to go back to his own bed and that he shouldn’t be there. Later that month, he took the children on an outing to Robinson Lake, in Randfontein. The witness decided to stay at home. Her family returned at five p.m.
I noticed that Faith was upset. She came and spoke to me and said the accused took her into the trees and pushed her down on the ground. I was upset and took the children and ran out of the house. When the accused returned from Randfontein he was not sober, he could not walk straight. I told him he should leave the girls alone. He said he was lonely. When I said he must not touch them he said he was living by the laws of nature. When he said this he was drunk. Three months ago Pauline complained to me and said the children must not stay in the room alone with the accused.
Q: You forbade me to have liquor in house.
A: Yes.
Q: You warned me that unless I stopped drinking you would take action against me and have me put in an institution or a work colony.
A: I suggested treatment for alcoholism.
Q: On two occasions the children found alcohol which I had hidden.
A: I don’t know.
Q: Did you know that I hid alcohol in the girls’ bedroom?
A: No.
Under reexamination, the witness said the accused had assaulted her, but not in the past year. When under the influence, he was, she said, “unreasonable with children.”
This was the sum of her testimony. It was a bare-minimum account, but it was unequivocal. A surgeon then appeared to confirm that he had examined both the twelve-year-old and her seven-year-old sister. There were signs of hemorrhage in the former, he said, consistent with forceful intercourse with penetration. Asked to describe the examination as either easy or painful, he replied, “Painful.” He described the seven-year-old as showing signs of “interference.” It was the euphemism my mother always used. This seven-year-old was then brought to the stand, warned to speak the truth, and asked if she understood what that meant. She confirmed that she did. She named the town where her family used to live and explained that because her mother worked, she wasn’t always home when they got back from school. Sometimes, she said, their father was home. She was then asked if she remembered the day the doctor saw her. Yes, she said. The exam had been painful. It was noted in the court papers that, at this point, the prosecutor could get no further replies to his questions. The seven-year-old witness was unable to continue.
The twenty-four-year-old was of limited value to the prosecution, since she was far too old to provide any medical evidence, and her testimony was short. She confirmed her mother had died when she was two years old. She confirmed a series of addresses where the family had lived. “We stayed at Dannhauser, Natal,” she said,
and whilst there, as far as I can remember, it started. I cannot say for sure. I was about 15 years old when we stayed at De Deur, Vereeniging. Whilst staying there I had intercourse with my father. It happened very often. As far as I know the accused had full intercourse with me. Whilst at Witpoortjie I stayed with my father. He was always mixing with the children and touching them. None of the children ever complained to me, but because of my experience I was suspicious of my father. Shortly before I left Witpoortjie, at the end of August, I warned my stepmother. She made a report to me. I said I was not surprised.
The accused had no questions for his adult daughter.
The defendant’s eleven-year-old daughter, Doreen, was brought forth to testify. “During July holidays I was at home one afternoon,” she said. “Mother was working, my father was at home.” Her father called the witness’s seven-year-old sister to come into the room with him.
I know the smell of liquor. Father smelled of liquor. My sister went into the room with my father and he locked the door from inside. I was in the kitchen. I heard my sister crying. I went to the door and asked my father to open it. He opened the door a bit afterward and my sister came out. I asked her what happened and she said nothing.
We were doing homework and father told me to go to the shop. Faith followed me—she did not want to go to my father’s room. One day Faith was in the room and the door was locked and I knocked at the door and said I wanted a tissue. My father opened the door and Faith came out. It looked like she was crying. Her eyes were red and she was busy fastening her shirt. I asked her what happened and she said nothing.
I woke up on several occasions and found our father in our room. I heard Faith say, “leave me.” In my father’s bedroom, when Faith was in there with him, I heard the bed squeaking. It sounded like Faith was crying.
A prior witness statement was read out to the court, in which the eleven-year-old confirmed she had never been molested.
The only boy to testify was the defendant’s sixteen-year-old son, Tony, who spoke plainly and matter-of-factly in defense of his sister. He said:
Whilst staying at Witpoortjie I noticed Faith used to go into the accused’s room. Usually the door was locked from the inside. On one occasion I knocked at the door and asked him to open it. Faith opened the door. She looked cross. I have told my father not to take the girls in the room and lock the door. I did not want the girls to go in his room when he had been drinking.
One afternoon my mother came home early. I knew Faith was in my father’s room and the door was locked. My mother went to the door and found it was locked. When I got out of the bath my mother said she wanted to speak to me. I thought she was going to speak to me about the locked door and I reported it to her.
For over two years my father had been taking the girls into his room, that is since we stayed at Zwartkoppies. Faith did not like going to my father’s room. Once I asked Faith what was going on in the room. She did not reply.
The accused had no questions for his son.
Finally, it was the plaintiff’s turn to testify. Fay spoke in a voice so clear and confident it is hard to believe she was only twelve years old. Her courage makes a mockery of her image as saint to Doreen’s devil. Fay stood up in court, and as her older sister had urged her to, spoke up to confirm her name, her age, and her temporary address—with friends on Konig Avenue—and her former address “at Witpoortjie, Corlett Avenue, with my father and mother.”
One afternoon, she said, her father asked her to help him add up figures in the book they kept for recording the groceries. She was sitting on her mother’s bed; he was dressed in his pajamas. While she was adding up the columns, he locked the door. She tried to open the door, but he wouldn’t let her. He pushed her onto the bed. The twelve-year-old told the court:
His private part was in my private part. I felt pain. He was moving his body up and down. I wanted to call my brother but he put his hand over my mouth and then left me. My mother was at work. That night I told my mother that the accused had intercourse with me. My mother went to the room of the accused. I don’t know what she said.
Three weeks earlier, her mother had come home early from work. It was three or four in the afternoon. She was locked in the bedroom with her father. Her mother had shouted, “Faith, open the door.” Her father had put his pants on and opened the door. Her mother was at the door. She told her mother he had locked the door, lain on top of her, “and then he put his private in mine. Mother went and spoke to my father.”
Three or four days later, the accused called her to help him with a puzzle. It was something, he said, with which you could win a car. She said she didn’t want to, but he said she must. He got up and said he was going to get something, but instead he locked the door. He pushed her onto the bed. Her fifteen-year-old brother came and said, “Open the door.” Her father opened it and asked Tony what he wanted. Tony said he shouldn’t lock the door when there was a girl in the room. She left the room. Tony told her mother, in her presence, and her mother asked her if he did anything to her. She said no.
About a week later, the ice-cream cart came by. Her father told three of her siblings to go and buy ice cream. She wanted to go, too, but her father forbade her and asked her to get tea ready. While she was pouring water into the teapot, he pulled her away from the stove and the water spilled. She put the kettle down, and the accused took her to his room, left the door open, and pulled her pants down to her knees. She tried to get away. She hit him on the arm, and the accused hit her on the leg with his fist. He then let her go. The accused told her she must not be cross with him; he was not going to do anything, he was only playing.
The same night she told her mother. She told her mother on all these occasions. She could not tell the court when the first time had happened. She said she never agreed to him doing it.
On November 17, their father took three of them—the witness, her seven-year-old sister, and her eight-year-old brother—to an air rally near their house. They were playing. At some point in the afternoon, her father asked her to accompany him to where he said the airplanes landed. She told him she didn’t want to go. He took her arm and pulled her away and said he didn’t want to go alone.
She didn’t smell alcohol on his breath. She didn’t think he knew where they were going and told him to ask someone. He said he already had, and led her down a path into a wooded area, still holding her arm. He dragged her off the path and pushed her to the ground. She got up, pulled her arm away, and wanted to run. He got hold of her arm again and pushed her to the ground. She told him she would tell her mother. Her father said that if she did that, she would cause a lot of trouble, and she had caused enough trouble already. She asked him to leave her alone, and he told her not to shout, as someone might hear. She got up from the ground, pulled her pants up, and walked away. She tried to shout, but the accused put his hand over her mouth. He asked her not to tell her mother, and she said she would. “I am going to,” she said. He said he knew she wouldn’t. He then asked her if she wanted to go and look for where the airplanes landed. She said no.
When she got home, she told her mother, and they fled the house.
The court recorded only a brief segment of the cross-examination. The transcript conflated the two opening questions, so it was unclear which one she was answering.
Q: Have I ever been unkind to you or beat you or hurt you, we have always been fond of each other until now.
A: Yes.
Q: You always asked me to join your games.
A: Yes.
Q: I always joined in.
A: Yes.
Q: I have always given you what you have asked.
A: Yes.
Q: I was nearly always drunk.
A: Lots of times.
Q: Was I just as kind then.
A: Yes.
Her father’s defense, of diminished responsibility through alcohol, was not successful, and at the end of the weeklong hearing the magistrate found him guilty of the charge “that he did unlawfully assault, and then wrongfully and unlawfully, violently and against her will did ravish and casually know [the victim] and being asked what he will say in answer thereto and being at the same time cautioned that he is not obliged to make any statement that may incriminate him and that what he shall say may be used in evidence against him.”
Jimmy replied, “I have nothing to say.”
The magistrate committed him for full trial at the High Court. The accused requested that he be tried by a judge and no jury. It took place four months later and lasted ten days.
As far as I’m aware, he was kept in jail for the entirety of those four months. He was not able personally to intimidate the witnesses. What, if anything, provoked his wife to change her testimony is unknown, although having to go through the entire ordeal again, this time before a High Court judge in full wig and robes and with journalists on the press bench, strikes me as more than sufficient. None of Marjorie’s children can remember what she said; what was revoked and what of her original testimony survived. Only my mother remembered, and I had been too afraid to ask her. I can’t summon any particular animosity toward Marjorie. At this distance the failure of the action seems secondary to the fact that something was said and done in the first place, that it is a matter of public record and that my aunt and I, all these years later, are having dinner tonight and talking about it.
Doreen remembers very little of the High Court trial. It’s extraordinary, what the mind does to protect itself. Sometimes only the smallest things stick. The strongest single image she retains is from the morning before it started. For those ten days, she says, her sisters and her mother were accommodated at the state’s expense in a hostel in downtown Johannesburg, and that first morning they sat in the dining room and had breakfast. Although it was a weekday, the girls were made to wear their Sunday hats for court, and a horrible boy in the breakfast room laughed at them. “Why are you wearing hats?” he said, and Doreen, as her mother had instructed her, replied, “Because we are going to the dentist.”
This had made the boy laugh even harder. “Who wears hats to the dentist?”
It was this small mortification that stayed with her; that and the memory of her father’s face in court. She remembers looking up and seeing him during her testimony and feeling paralyzed. All she could think was that she was letting her mother down. “Although . . .” She bends her eyes out of focus and tries to remember.
“There was something about a tissue, wasn’t there?” says Doreen.
Yes, I say. There was something about a tissue.